Ghosts
by HesMines
Summary: It's been ten years since Shannon was murdered in front of Kelly and Maddie's eyes. Now, a school project brings all those memories flooding back. Sometimes, you can't escape the memories. Kelly survived, but at what cost?


**For tonyandzivaforever because she's just awesome :D …and for forgiving me for thinking that Hersey is a cereal bar :$**

**Since I'm Scottish, I don't have a clue about the American school system – although Sarah did try! The class is based off of the higher Modern Studies class I was kinda attached to (the joys of advanced higher!) It was small and my 'Mr. Lawson' had the opportunity to add extra stuff in. I just enhanced the effect for this fic. And I've never taken history, but I'm pretty sure they don't cover the drug trade! **

**Katie…recognize Mr. Lawson? :P (just pretend you didn't beta it :P) This is definitely AU – I don't own a thing!**

Sometimes, it's the little things that set you off. You might not think the little things really matter, but in reality, the little things are everything.

_**NCISNCISNCIS**_

_Every time I close the door on reality it comes in through the windows. Jennifer Yane_

Whoever she is, she was right. You can't escape reality any more than you can escape the past. You can't ignore them. You have to face the facts and accept them. Otherwise, you're vulnerable. Its attack is quick and lethal. You can't see it coming anymore than you can predict a wild animal's movements. There are warning signs, of course. Animals become agitated. Dark clouds gather in the sky. The drugs runner with his feet cut off as a warning to rival cartels.

_That_ picture of a little girl covered in her mother's blood.

The warning signs of a drug war have been there for years. But nothing was done until it was too late. The war was already waging and the 'enemy' was armed. Too bad we have to have countless, faceless enemies. The only saving grace is that they hate each other as much as they hate us. They were prepared for the fight. We were not. But then again they had been fighting amongst themselves for years.

The realities of the Mexican Drug War affect us all in different ways. For some, it might mean they are too scared to go out at night. It might mean the loss of personal freedom. For others, it sadly provides a means for them to feed their families.

Drug lords like Paloma Reynosa (drug lady doesn't quite have the same effect) live in their mansions south of the border, relatively safe from the American Forces. Their mules die on our streets and rot in our prisons. They're expendable. _We_ are expendable.

You can look at the consequences from two angels. You have the obvious effects – multiple deaths, gang battles throughout cities, rich drug lords – but then you have the less obvious effects. After the shock wears off, no one will think about that little girl in the picture. They will move on and forget, but she will have to live with reality of her mother's death forever.

_**NCISNICSNICS**_

"Gibbs! Tyler! Get over here!" The two marines in question looked up at their commander's call. They clocked him on the other side of the mess hall...tent, wearing a grim expression and clutching a piece of paper.

The two men looked at each other, seeing their fear mirrored on the other's face. Their guts had been acting up for days and knew _something_ was wrong. And they were pretty sure the problem _wasn't_ in Kuwait. Jumping from their seats, they quickly followed him to his office.

"You might want to sit down for this one Gunny," the commander began apologetically as he sat behind his desk. He waited a moment as Gibbs reluctantly sat, watching the commander for any sign of what was about to be revealed. Sighing, he held out the paper to Gibbs, "Shannon was murdered last night. I'm sorry."

Gibbs froze, his eyes going wide. He stared dumbly at the paper being held out to him, and was exceedingly grateful when David snatched the paper away. He couldn't process the words. He'd heard them, but he couldn't make his brain accept them. Somehow, he managed to choke out, "Kelly? Maddie?"

"They're fine." The commander was quick to reassure. "You two are on the next flight out of –"

"They saw the whole thing." David cut across the commander. He looked up from the paper, glaring at the commander as if it was his fault. "They saw the whole damn thing!"

_**NCISNCISNICS**_

"Today, we're going to be doing something a little different." Alan Lawson announced to his senior history class, and was not disappointed by their reaction. It was a small class with only eleven students – the boys were outnumbered eight to three. However, the noise they were currently making made them seem twice their size. At twenty nine, he was a relatively new teacher with only a few years experience under his belt, but his methods worked and he had one of the highest pass rates in the school. "Okay, okay, shut up so I can get started."

That was the thing he loved about the senior classes, he smiled as pointed at the projector to start his presentation. They really got into his subject and they were here because they wanted to be here. Plus, the small classes gave him so much more flexibility. He would never have been able to do this kind of lesson if there had been over twenty in the class.

Turning around, he grinned at his pupils. They had no idea what he had in store for them. They had been learning about the history of South America, and in particular it's drug trade. However, up until this point the discussion had been dated and out of context. The examiners were more concerned about the beginning of it, its origins and its initial impact rather than how it had evolved and was affecting life today. But since they had time, he was going to make sure they found out about it.

Movement out of the corner of his eye drew his attention for a second. Kelly Gibbs was sharing a knowing look with her best friend Maddie Tyler, with a sly smirk and a mischievous spark in both their eyes. Kelly glanced at him, somehow knowing that his eyes were on her. Grinning, she mouthed the word 'project' and then shrugged as if daring him to contradict her. He shook his head slightly and smiled back, letting her know she was right.

There was something about those two that was slightly unnerving, even after eighteen months. The other staff said it was like the girls were psychic. They always seemed to know what was coming next, what people were thinking. He, however, had just accepted the quirk and got on with getting to know the girls as people. Besides, it was pretty obvious what the cause was.

They were self-confessed navy brats in a mainstream school.

They had arrived halfway through junior year. Kelly arrived first. Her father was a Master Gunnery Sergeant based at Quantico. Her stepmother was the Director of NCIS. They'd relocated to Washington from California when Jenny Gibbs was promoted. There was no mention of her biological mother – no one asked and Kelly certainly wasn't telling. Maddie had followed on two weeks later. There was a rumor circulating the staff room which said the transfers had been planned so that the girls weren't split up for too long. Alan didn't pay much attention to that, he believed in giving the girls a fighting chance. Besides, there had also been a rumor that Sarah, the captain of the drill team, had run over a herd of goats with a tractor while she was visiting family in Georgia…

"Right, we've been looking at the drug trade in South America, yeah?" He addressed the class with his usual energy, quickly moving on from his musings. He pointed the clicker at the screen, "Well, this well, this week we're going to be doing a little self study. I want a five minute presentation. You can work in groups. I want to know how the Mexican Drug Wars are affecting us _now_."

Alan grinned as he saw the clogs starting to turn in his pupils' minds. The boys were exchanging glances, no doubt thinking about how they could get some dodgy cartoons into their presentation. Their last one had featured the Pope hitting Galileo over the head with his telescope. It was inaccurate, but it got a few giggles from the girls. The girls were more interested in pairing off….all of them except Kelly. She seemed a little paler than normal and was staring resolutely at the screen. The girl to her left was looking at the brunette in confusion because Kelly was normally loud and bubbly – the staff's uneasiness hadn't been transferred to the student body. However, to Kelly's right, Maddie also looked a little pale but the blonde seemed more in control of herself. She was glancing worriedly between Kelly and the door, as if she was trying to figure out an escape route.

Then it hit him – they used to live in California. They were right on the border. Their fathers were Marines. They probably had first/second-hand experience of how it was 'affecting us now.'

Making a mental note to ask them if they were okay, he continued, "Now other than the Reynosa cartel, I don't know anything about these drug lords. Your job is to tell me – all I did was Google the list." He turned to face the screen and pulled up the six pictures. "I want you all to pick a gangster. The next slide will tell you what you need to find out, but right now, all you need to do is pick someone. Paloma Reynosa, Joaquín Guzmán, Pedro Hernandez –"

"For God's sake take that picture down!"

Alan wasn't the only one who jumped at Maddie's scream. He spun around to see Maddie jumping out of her seat and going to stand in front of Kelly's desk. The brunette now looked faintly green and was clutching the edge of her desk so tightly that her knuckles had gone white. Her head was still facing forwards, but her eyes were darting everywhere and she was shaking. She didn't seem to notice Maddie standing in front of her, trying to pull her from whatever she was seeing.

"Kelly…Kelly…c'mon Kel, snap out of it, it's not real…he can't hurt you…Kelly you're scaring me…" Maddie was trying to keep her cool, but Alan could see that she herself was fighting something. He quickly turned off the projector, hoping that removing the image would help. While the rest of the class looked on in shock, he moved closer, trying to figure out what had went wrong.

As he got closer he realized that Maddie was keeping her distance from Kelly, as if she _knew_ she shouldn't touch the other girl. There was something about this scene that made it seem like it wasn't the first time something like this had happened. When Kelly started whimpering, Maddie moved back. She took a deep breath before slamming her hands down on the table and barking in a way which could only be likened to that of a drill sergeant, "Snap out of it, Gibbs!"

It worked. Kelly jerked backwards, her head snapping up to look at Maddie. There was a beat of silence as the two girls studied each other. Kelly looked absolutely terrified. They both looked like lost little girls, not the confident individuals that everyone in the class had come to know.

Suddenly, Kelly choked out, "I'm gonna be sick." She clasped her hand over her mouth and ran towards the door.

Once Kelly was out of the room, Maddie slumped to the floor. She rested her head against the leg of the table behind her and closed her eyes. When Alan kneeled down beside her, she slowly opened her eyes and tilted her head towards him. She'd never admit it to anyone other than Kelly, but she secretly found the young teacher quite attractive. But then again, navy brats tended to have a thing for either rebels or authority figures. Any other time, his proximity would have set her heart racing, but at this moment in time she was seeing double. She knew she was looking into her concerned teacher's eyes, but she couldn't get the image of Shannon lying in a pool of blood out of her head.

Tears sprung to Maddie's eyes and she hastily wiped them away. It didn't matter what the shrink told her, tears were a sign of weakness. "Can someone go after Kelly?" she whispered as she tucked a loose strand of hair behind her ear. "I would go, but I can't do sick…not since…" Maddie bit her lip as the tears started again. She was ashamed about the fact that she couldn't help her friend, but she couldn't get the image out of her head. Closing her eyes, she hid her face in her knees as if it would help. She wanted to sigh in relief when she heard two people move to go after Kelly, but she couldn't breathe right. When she felt Alan's comforting hand on her back, she whimpered, "So much blood…"

"Maddie…Maddie what happened?" Alan asked quietly as he continued to rub circles on the blonde's back. He had a funny feeling that she was a few minutes away from losing it like Kelly had, but he needed to know what he was dealing with. There was nothing in either of their files to suggest that something untoward had happened, but that didn't mean it wasn't covered up.

"Pedro Hernandez is the reason her mom's dead." Maddie eventually whispered. "We…we saw everything. It'll be ten years next week. That's why she reacted so badly. Any other point in the year and we would have been _fine_." She turned to face him again, her eyes pleading. She hated this weakness and wanted him to know that they could have handled it. Sure, they would have skipped the Hernandez presentation, but it wouldn't have been this spectacle.

Trying to fight the images that were bombarding her mind, she turned so that she was in Alan's embrace and hid her head in his shoulder. She needed to feel protected, and was reacting purely on instinct. She trusted him, he was safe. As she watched Shannon fall to the ground, Maddie whimpered, "We were _eight_…"

"_Girls, c'mon, time to get dinner ready!" Shannon called from the front porch as she searched for her daughter and her best friend. _

_Kelly and Maddie grinned at each other from their hiding place behind the bush. They weren't really hiding, they were searching for ladybugs. But her Mom thought they were hiding. At Shannon's call, the girls eagerly jumped up and headed towards the door. In their houses, 'getting dinner ready' was actually code for 'you two can decorate dessert while I make something edible'. _

_Shannon grinned when she heard the rattle of the bushes behind her. While it meant that she would have a rather messy house to clear up, it meant the girls were having fun. It was coming up for nine months that their dads had been overseas, and the serious i-miss-daddy emotions always kicked in again around the halfway point. Right now, any and all smiles were a good thing._

_Kelly suddenly spotted a football on her path to her mom. Stopping for a moment, she picked it up and shouted, "Catch it Mom!"_

_Everything happened in slow motion. Shannon laughed at her daughter's antics and jumped to catch the ball. As her hands closed around the ball, there was a loud bang. Shannon twitched in midair, and her grip on the ball loosened. She screamed as she fell to the ground, landing on her knees and clutching her middle. Maddie and Kelly stopped dead. They both knew what that noise had been – it was a gunshot. _

"_Mom?" Kelly asked fearfully, her voice nothing more than a whisper. If she'd had more of a grip on the situation, she'd have notice the marines running from their houses to investigate. All she could see was that her mother was crying, trying her hardest not to scream at the pain. _

"_Girls…get inside." Shannon choked. She looked up at the girls, panic written across her face. The movement clearly hurt, because the next moment she cried out. Kelly was frozen to the spot by terror and unable to move. Home was safe. People didn't get hurt at home. Daddy was the one she had to worry about. Maddie, however, was staring at Shannon in wide-eyed shock and noticed the growing red stain on Shannon's white top. She screamed._

"_Go!" Shannon coughed, blood spraying the front of her top. _

_The mixture of blood and Maddie's scream seemed to pull Kelly out of her trance, but it had the opposite effect from what Shannon had hoped for. Instead of running towards the house, she started crying and ran towards her mother. Before she had taken two steps, there was another crack. _

"_Mom!" Kelly screamed as Shannon went flying backwards. The woman hit the concrete with a muted thump, and in the next instant Kelly was beside her. She kept repeating the same word over and over again, clawing at her mother's body and trying vainly to wake her up. As Kelly cried, the blood from both of Shannon's wounds began to transfer onto her clothes, staining her skin and matting in her hair. "Mommy!"_

_Maddie felt her knees give out as she collapsed onto the grass. As much as she wanted to, she couldn't look away. She wanted to look away from her second mother's glassy eyes staring at her, away from the red wound in the middle of her head and the blood pooling around her, but she couldn't._

_The world around both girls seemed muted. They were vaguely aware of the screaming going on behind them, as well as the screams coming from their own mouths, but they were detached from the whole thing. Maddie didn't resist when she felt one of the marines pick her up from the grass and carry her away from the scene. She hid her head in his chest and cried, because she couldn't make the image go away. Kelly resisted. She cried and screamed and kicked at the marines, begging her mom to get up. She begged for her daddy, because he would know what to do. When they finally managed to take her away from her mother's body, they took her into Maddie's kitchen. The moment Kelly set eyes on her best friend's white face she knew it was all real. She threw up over the marine holding her and was still being sick when Mike Franks arrived._

_If you asked either of the girls how long the entire ordeal took, they would swear it took longer than a minute. According to the official report – and every marine in the area – there was a gap of seventeen seconds between the first and second gunshots._

Screwing her eyes tighter against the memory, Maddie murmured, "We were only eight…"

_**NCISNCISNCIS**_

Alan sat down in his chair with a sigh once the last member of his senior class had left. After Kelly's meltdown on Thursday, he had had someone call the girls' parents. In the end it was Jenny Gibbs and her detail that arrived to pick them both up. He took it as a positive sign that when Jenny arrived Kelly had thrown herself into Jenny's arms with the words, "Mom, make it go away." While it didn't mean she was okay, it meant she had the bond with Jenny to get through it. He'd worried that, if she was too worked up about her biological mother, she'd lash out at her stepmother.

Neither girl had been in on Friday or Monday. It was now Tuesday and he guessed he wouldn't see them for the rest of the week. On Friday the class had Google-ed Pedro Hernandez and had found out what exactly had happened. Shannon Gibbs was ready to testify against him and was set to send him to prison for the rest of his life. He'd hired a hitman to kill her, but by the time NIS had figured it out he had escaped to Mexico. He was killed by an unknown sniper three years later.

They had also found the picture that most marines now associated with the case. Kelly was clinging to her mother's dead body, screaming as the marines tried to pull her away while, in the background, Maddie was crying and staring at the body in horror. One of the marines who lived in the street had filmed the entire thing for NIS. He'd said it was the least he could do for the family to make sure that nothing was missed in between the shooting and NIS' arrival.

It was a horrible thought and he knew the girls would probably want to put the whole thing behind them on their return. Heaving another sigh he decided to check his emails before he went home for a nice strong drink.

Scrolling through his inbox, he found the usual amount of junk mail from the School District and an email from his boss asking how the seniors were handling the revelation about Kelly's mother. The usual. Then he found an email from Kelly in between an email about next month's department meeting and a rather annoyed email from the librarian complaining about his sophomores. Frowning slightly, he opened the email.

_Hi sir :)_

_Sorry about our meltdown on Thursday, as bad as it was for us, it can't have been easy on everyone else. I know it's silly but we thought we were past that stage, especially now that we're out of California and people don't know about Mom. Sometimes, it's the little things that remind you more than anything else. Anyway, here's our report. I hope it's okay – we never did make it to 'what-you-need' slide!_

_Kelly x_

Shaking his head at their stubbornness, he clicked on the attachment to the email. If it was anyone else, he would have worried about them. Why would someone force themselves to do a report on the very topic that had made them lose it in class? But those girls were resilient. He knew that they were more what-doesn't-kill-you-makes-you-stronger than lets-avoid-the-hard-subjects. He wasn't sure if it was a good thing or not that he could see them sitting down, taking a deep breath and writing this through their tears.

**Paloma Reynosa by Kelly and Maddie**

"_Every time I close the door on reality it comes in through the windows." Jennifer Yane. Whoever she is, she was right. You can't escape reality any more than you can escape the past._ _You can't ignore them. You have to face the facts and accept them. Otherwise, you're vulnerable. Its attack is quick and lethal. You can't see it coming anymore than you can predict a wild animal's movements._

**Well…yeah…that's depressing as hell. Like I said to tonyandzivaforever when I finished this – it wasn't meant to be this long or this sad! But…it came out like this…and I kinda like it…**

**HesMines x**


End file.
